I think I came up with a solution to my parallel port problem, but
I cheated.  Thanks to a couple of comments from list members, I decided that
trying to improvise an ACK signal to run that old speech synthesizer from
the P.C. parallel port wasn't going to be worth the effort.  If the screen
dumps I meant to send to the synthesizer caused any problem with it, I would
have been stuck with that.

        I found out much to my surprise that Jameco still sells 8-bit
bidirectional parallel ports that can be set to unused printer port addresses.
At about $20.00, this sounded like just the ticket.

        Thanks to the couple of people who answered my questions, I
confirmed what options were left and finally decided to change course and
work smarter rather than harder.  I will now dump the printer port data
to another P.C. and capture it.  The Votrax synthesizer works great connected
to a serial port so that should pretty well take care of things.

        For anybody else who wants full 8-bit input, the part number from
the catalog is 129373.

        Again, thanks for helping me make a decision.

Martin McCormick